38. A paen to asparagus

Today I bought asparagus from my farmers’ market. I had been looking forward to this all week, since last week we just missed out on getting the last bunch.  So even though Roy went out for dinner last night and didn’t get back till nearly 1am and even though I’ve been sick all week and couldn’t sleep last night waiting for him to get back (not because I was worried, just because I couldn’t sleep)… we had to be up early this morning to get to the market before all the asparagus was gone. Does this seem excessive? After all, you can buy asparagus in Sainsbury’s every day… That asparagus, however, comes from Peru, which is quite a long way. I don’t buy it. This asparagus comes from Hampshire (or possibly Shropshire) and has just come into season. It was worth getting up for.

The chestnuts and the rowan trees are in flower this week. The flowering cherries have almost finished, but they have been so very beautiful. I think Roy might have got tired of me exclaiming at ever single tree we passed (they grow them as street trees around here, so I exclaimed a lot). The white rowan blossoms are lovely but the pink ones are one of the most beautiful flowers I have ever seen – from a distance they look like may, but up close they’re very like geraldton wax, but softer and pinker – just exquisite.

The ducklings we saw newly hatched a few weeks ago in the park are now half-grown; where they were skittering across the surface of the water almost like insects, now they’re swimming and diving and breaking away from their tight formations. There are a couple of newly-hatched families too – one with nine babies and one very harassed looking mother. Also baby coots.

Matching all this spring niceness is the joyous fact that Roy’s Big Book was sent to press on Wednesday. It has been a long time getting to this point. The relief of not waiting for the next lot of proofs to arrive, errors to be found, corrections to be made, re-made and re-made again, things to go strangely awry (in the supposedly very last lot of proofs, sent on Monday, a rogue 3/2 time signature was spotted floating somewhere near the running header on a page that had previously been fine)… is indescribable. Now we just have to hope the thing comes back from the printers in time for the launch on 15 May…

Last night I found in the fridge some tomato sauce with a use-by date of May 2007. The fact that it still smelt perfectly ok made me throw it out even faster.

36a. Flowers and skeletons

I meant to say that where the Weald was covered in bluebells, the Downs were covered in violets. Really covered.

There were cowslips too.

And I’ve found possibly my absolute favourite English place name, outranking Pease Pottage and Warninglid (both of which we passed on the way to Brighton): Skeleton Hovel. Isn’t that wonderful? It was on my Ordnance Survey map and I’ve not yet worked out whether it refers to a community, a farm or… a hovel. Worth visiting, I think.

36. Home thoughts, from abroad

Today I saw a bluebell wood. We drove on back roads from Brighton to Epsom (inside the M25, close to home) across South and North Downs and through the Weald between them. Once the Weald was all oak trees, and bluebells in the spring. Now it’s mostly farmland but wherever there’s a bit of woodland, the ground this week is blue and purple. It is very very beautiful. We also saw primroses, snowdrops, pink and white bluebells, buttercups and tulips growing by the roadside, plus all the flowering blackthorn in the hedgerows, the cherry trees, even the dandelions are more beautiful here (brighter and less dry and straggly looking). Yesterday, driving down to Brighton, we stopped at Devil’s Dyke (on the South Downs) and did a lovely walk that involved in part climbing straight up the Dyke
(200m… and it got its name because the slope is so steep compared to the rest of the Downs). Across the top the ridge is very narrow, so we could see in all directions, across the Weald and down to Brighton and out to see. We saw a chaffinch too… and more that my dopey brain can’t remember at the moment, because today I have a heavy cold and am feeling a little miserable (though on the positive side, I’m writing this from my bed where I am being nicely cosseted…)

I like this country in the springtime. It is so beautiful. Just the last two weeks all the leaves have come out, and driving through the lanes everything is green… except for the flowers… and the lambs…

For the first time I really understand what Browning was on about. I’ve never in my life until today thought ‘O to be in England…’ and meant it! (‘…now that April’s there…

…And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England – now!

35. Banks and braes

It has been a little while, I know, but I have been doing many things, and in my computering moments wrestling with the recalcitrant core of my chapter (nearly got it now…)

I have been… wandering around upper-class Wimbledon with my jet-lagged parents, admriing magnolias in bloom…

…giving a day’s worth of classes on Ravel, with Roy, as part of the Oxford University’s Day Schools (Continuing Education) – hard work but lots of fun, for an audience of ex-dons and one blind Lord (who asked the most incisive questions of anyone and has asked us to lunch in the House of Lords one day…). I was reprimanded after the first session (of 4 in the day) by one elderly former physics lecturer: ‘I’ve been lecturing for forty years, and you simply must speak up!’ ‘Well, you’re sitting at the back of the room, the air-conditioning is loud and I’ve just had a cold – there are seats free further up if you’d like to move?’ ‘No, I like sitting at the back…’ But apart from that, it went very well. It’s quite nice to be talking to the sort of audience who, when Grieg’s name comes up in a question, I waffle around saying, ‘Now, Grieg died in, was it… 1904?’ and three voices immediately pipe in with ‘1907!’

…spending my birthday in the Cotswolds, wandering through fields of lambs and primroses. Really. We stayed the night after the Oxford day near Woodstock (where Blenheim Palace is) in an old farmhouse B&B, which was lovely,

then the next day – my birthday – pottered around the beautiful Cotswolds equipped with Ordinance Survey maps and stout boots. We went for a walk in the Wychwood – it happened to be the one day of the year when the local lord opened up the wood for the peasantry to walk through; we admired the primroses in the wood and considered sabotaging his pheasant-shooting treehouses. We had lunch in Stow-on-the-wold (a picnic on the village green, by the old stocks) and then went walking through Upper and Lower Slaughte along the River Windrush (how I love those names…), through said fields of gambolling lambs – and the daffofdils! It was so adorably English!

…visiting Hampton Court Palace, mostly to goggle at the flowers again – suddenly I have a lot more sympathy for Wordsworth…

…spending two happy days in central London, the first in a slow wander that began at London Bridge and ended at Green Park, via St Pauls, the Strand, the Temple (‘only members of the Inner Temple may walk their dogs on this lawn!’), Trafalgar Square, the National Portrait Gallery (magnificent and free), the River, the Abbey (the outside only…) and St James’ Park; plus lunch in a sweet and cosy little pub just off the Strand.  The next day we had lunch with the four Depasquales (Sarah and Bernard, JAmes and MArtha); James and Martha are living here at the moment – though James is about to head off travelling again – and Bernard and Sarah came to visit them. That was also lovely. Then Mum and Dad went to admire more daffodils in Regent’s Park and Roy and I went home to work…

…taking the Flying Scotsman (!) from Kings Cross to Edinburgh, a beautiful journey which was made the more enjoyable by the presence of a power point by my seat; I spent the whole trip sorting out this recalcitrant bit of chapter, and managed it just as we were pulling into Edinburgh – but I did look out the window a lot too, and it was beautiful. Then we hopped on another trian to Glasgow, found our hire car and headed off to Helensburgh.

…exploring Helensburgh, which is beautiful, the weekend resort for rich Glasweigans in the 19th century; it’s on the Firth of Clyde, and our appartment is right on the front, gorgeous views. Up the hill a little is all extravagant mansions – aptly termed the Scottish Baronial style, I believe – 19th century Gothic, with turrets and cornices and crenellations all stuck on every possible corner. Quite fun but not nice to live in I think.

…Walked around the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond – and they were indeed bonnie. Beautiful, soft, watercolour light, gorse in flower everywhere and heather too, daffodils and primroses and water everywhere – burns and soaks and mud. Mum was jealous.

…seeing a speckled thrush catching worms, lots of robin redbreasts and some golden finches…

…seeinglots of very very beautiful countryside

…having a very silly walk along the banks of Loch Long: we kept thinking we’d find the path soon – but when we did, it took us into the back of a Ministry of Defence area, with massive oil storage tanks anywhere (and, strangely, one old farmhouse, boarded up), and we found ourselves on the wrong side of an enormous and very unfriendly fence.

We then had to climb back up the hill, asked council of an elderly gentleman who happened to be hanging out the washing behind his house – which was within this enclosure, bizarrely enough – and he directed us up hills, over fences, across a burn – and finally, back to the road through a rhododhendron forest. Ever tried getting through a rhododhendron forest on a Scottish hillside? They like growing in the mud. And they grow thick and dark, and you have to bend double to get through. This was a very Kilpatrick sort of walk (Mum didn’t enjoy it, but Dad and I did)…. but the views were gorgeous, I liked tramping through the heather and bracken, squelching across burns, admiring passing deer and pheasants!

Today, I hope, we’ll cross the Firth of Clyde (at Old Kilpatrick!) and go to see Roy’s part of the world. His burr is stronger up here…